Martinique - Guadeloupe
Trippwire
Sun 17 Jan 2010 20:03
Next stop after
Marin was St Pierre, on the top end of Martinique. This is a very charming small
town, with a great mix of French culture (it was very weird waking up in the
Caribbean to hear church bells - you could have been in England), with a
Caribbean shabbiness. Croissant for breakfast was definitely the order of the
day. It also has an extinct volcano just above the bay, and so the overall
scenery is fantastic.
More importantly
though by far, was the reason for our stop over: it is the nearest anchorage to
the JB Rum distillery. I was introduced to the delights of JB Rum by Dimitris on
Christmas eve - it is the oldest distillery on Martinique and produces what is
arguably the best vintage rum.
We warmed ourselves
up on the first day by going to the Depaz distillery, which was interesting, but
I was not so keen on the rum (or maybe they were trying to get rid of us and
offered us their roughest rum..either way, it worked!). The following day our
plan was to get a taxi over to the JB distillery. Amazingly the taxi
drivers would not take us there and back for the morning despite us
offering €60 for the ride. We are pretty sure that it was because they were
going to get back after lunchtime......very typically French!! So we
hired a car for half the price of a taxi fare and headed over to the distillery.
Given that this
produces tens of thousands of bottles of rum each year, it was fantastically
basic, with much of the old machinery being used, and all being driven by a
steam engine. Sadly it was not the rum making season, because it would have been
a fantastic sight.
All the tours were
done in French...for some reason the "Je mapelle Miles, et jai trente sixe
ans...et parlez vous anglais?" did not really seem to cut it, and so we were
left to wander around by ourselves. For any of you thinking of making your own
rum, here are the instructions below, and I will look forward to being invited
around for a bit of a taster...(Vicky: prior warning: I will be taking Ed out
and topping him up with vintage rum on return...but I promise this time to make
sure that he gets in a taxi rather than letting him walk several miles
through some dodgy areas of London to
get home!)
Given that I was
driving, the tasting was rather more restrained than Portugal, and so there was
a corresponding significantly reduced rum procurement...gooooodddd
Miles!....in fact, now I come to write this blog, I suspect that it may not have
been the taxi drivers wanting their lunch - would it be cynical to think that
Jennifer may have bribed them to force me into hiring a car and
driving?.....would she really do that?! Hmmmm.....
One of the features
out here seem to be the sunsets. You would have thought that we had got used to
them by now...but nope - they only seem to get more impressive. I suspect when
we come to look at the photos in a few years time they will consist of
predominantly sunsets and pictures of the boat (oh, and a ridiculous number of
volcano pictures as you will see in the next blog!)
We left St Pierre
for Dominica with mixed feelings. There has been a lot of chat about the
security situation, particularly in Rousseau (the capital). We decided to put
into a bay in the top corner, home to the town Portsmouth. We actually found
that there were masses of boats there and the security situation had been rather
exaggerated...quite aside from that, on our way into the bay, we finally
hooked a fish...more of that in another blog.
Dominica is a
fascinating country and having shunned much of the old colonial financial
handouts, is remarkably poor in comparison to the two French run islands that
it is sandwiched in between. So, a day there, and another sunset and we
headed on our way after two extremely rolly nights at
anchor.
On leaving Dominica,
we headed to a group of islands belonging to Guadeloupe called Les Saintes. They
are very French and the bay that we anchored up in was very pretty. We walked
into the local town - only a mile or so's walk up a steep(ish) hill, and
suddenly realised that our fitness was not quite as it was....you use lots of
muscles on the boat just trying to stand upright, but these don't seem to be the
same as the ones required to walk on land - old chicken legs here was shattered
by the time we had gone there and back!!
From Les Saints we
headed straight to the top of Guadeloupe, where we spent a night, before heading
off for Montserrat.
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